


reason to celebrate

by puckity



Series: Sam/Bucky Week 2014 [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Birthday Fluff, M/M, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-19 18:18:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2398175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puckity/pseuds/puckity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky doesn't think it's his birthday, but he can't be sure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	reason to celebrate

**Author's Note:**

> For reference, Marvel lists Bucky's birthday as March 10, 1917.
> 
> A birthday-ish addition to my take on the finding Bucky trope, with bonus OT3 nudging.
> 
> Written for Sam/Bucky Week 2014 and beta'd by the wonderful-as-ever Rachel!
> 
> You can also follow me on [Tumblr](http://puckity.tumblr.com/).

The whole floor is quiet except for the smack of body against punching bag, expanding in Bucky’s head. It’s like a balloon being pumped full; it pushes out all the other scraps of sounds and smells and still images and moving memories that knock around Bucky’s mind when he’s got nothing else to think about and burrow into the cracks of the life—of the person—he’s trying to rebuild. He’s finished his training for the afternoon but he lets the sensations linger, focuses on them so he can’t focus on the hush of a bullet out of a silencer or the recall of how much force it takes to slice through flesh on the first try.

He stops in the middle of the bare hallway between the sparring rooms and the exercise showers. He’s hungry; he retraces his steps and turns off towards the elevators.

“Hello, Sergeant Barnes.” It’s not the first disembodied voice he’s listened to; the Soldier spent years taking orders from nothing more than a speaker set in the walls. But it still catches Bucky off-guard, makes him flinch. “Where would you like to go?”

“Kitchen.” Something kicks up begrudgingly in Bucky’s stomach. “Please.”

“Very good, sir.” The voice that the others call JARVIS seems to hesitate. It sounds so human—more human than most of the real people he spent the past 70 years with—and Bucky sometimes wonders if there is a body locked away somewhere in the Tower to go along with it. “I assume you mean the communal kitchen, sergeant?”

Of course he means the communal kitchen. There are god knows how many kitchens in this strange, rambling fortress but—other than the cramped one in his living quarters—the communal kitchen is the only one he’s got access to. Still, it’s nice to be asked.

“Yes.”

The mechanical hum of the elevator calms him. He hadn’t wanted to come to this place, full of people he should have known but didn’t. Full of classified documents in his file that watched him with a dirty mix of pity and suspicion. Full of questions and theories about a _him_ that Bucky only half remembered—sometimes pretended he didn’t remember at all. He hadn’t wanted to come here so Steve had bought a rollaway bed and given Bucky a key to his apartment and it was better and worse because in the cramped space there was nothing to distract him from the aching in the pit of his stomach and the muscle memory that he didn’t understand and the way he looked at Steve and the way _he_ looked at Steve.

There was nothing in the cramped space to distract Bucky from himself. And then Steve was gone for days, weeks, gone with his partner, gone with his team and something nasty nagged at the back of Bucky’s skull when Steve said that and wasn’t talking about him.

Sam had an extra bed too, had a guest bed even though he said that the only people who visit him anymore are hulking supersoldiers who barely fit on it. When it wasn’t Sam and Steve it was Sam and Bucky—Sam would come over to Steve’s apartment and drag Bucky out. Make him eat. Talk his ear off. Threaten to read him a bedtime story if he didn’t go to sleep. Steve’s rollaway was scratchy and the springs poked into Bucky’s back like a bad massage. Sam’s bed was fluffy and soft—like a pillow over a face—and Bucky kept expecting it to clamp shut and smother him to death.

Every once in a while, Steve asked Bucky if he wanted to move into the Tower. Bucky didn’t want to. Not when Stark—the second Stark—offered him his own floor. Not when Natasha offered him daily (supervised) weapons practice. Not even when Steve started spending more time there than at home, although that did make Bucky start to think about it.

And then Sam told him that the Falcon had officially been asked to join the team.

So Steve and Sam got to share a floor above Bucky’s and everyone had to endure Sam’s bitter complaints about why _some people_ got whole floors while the rest of us had to make do with just half.

A bright ding and the elevator doors peel open. “Communal kitchen. Have a good meal, Sergeant Barnes.”

“Um, thanks.” Bucky never knows what to say now when the order isn’t to kill.

The kitchen is dark but the lights come up gradually as Bucky walks in. Nothing flickers, nothing shocks. It’s like a dawning, this whole building, and Bucky would flatter himself that Stark’s programmed it for him but he knows that there are more dangerous, twitchier people under this giant neon-embossed roof. He opens the refrigerator and reaches for the pre-cooked chicken breast but his hands hover over a box of half-eaten leftover pizza.

One slice won’t hurt.

Bucky hears another ding—faint and muffled by the open refrigerator door and his own hasty chewing—and then slow, loud footsteps. Not stamping so much as alerting. There’s only one person in this place who never sneaks up on Bucky, by accident or on purpose, but still manages to be irritating about it.

“All clear?” Sam laughs and doesn’t hang back in the doorway. “Are you eating Natasha’s pizza? She’ll kill you, you know.”

Bucky swallows around the crust and mutters something indistinct. The first thing he notices is Sam’s right hand stuffed behind his back.

“Aren’t you out on the mission today?” Bucky makes a show of taking out the chicken and putting it in the microwave. “Steve said they needed people in the field.”

“Nope, change of plans. I got the day off.” Sam smiles cocky and winning and something about it resonates with the past life people keep telling Bucky he lived. “You’d know that if you ever made it to the morning meetings.”

Bucky snorts. “I’m not part of the team, remember?” He turns his back to Sam and the Soldier whispers like poison in his ear— _exposed_ and _vulnerable_ and _careless_ and _sloppy_ —and his left arm itches for a trigger. He grips a milk carton instead. Bucky figures that he owes Sam a little trust, since he did find him and keep him for those first couple of months.

“What’s behind your back?” Bucky grabs a fork just in time for the microwave to beep done. “Did Natasha send you?”

Sam chuckles soft but doesn’t answer right away. Bucky turns towards him again.

“Nah, I just—” Sam rubs at the side of his neck. His eyes flick down. “You really can’t surprise a super-serumed assassin, can you?” He pulls his arm out; it’s a package wrapped in pink and purple heart print paper with a lime green bow stuck to one corner. He pushes it at Bucky.

“What’s that?” Bucky eyes the package not cautiously so much as curiously. His eyebrow quirks up. “The world’s least subtle bomb?”

“Yeah, keep it up smartass.” Sam’s got his free hand on his hip but the corners of his mouth are twitching up. “I won’t even give you your birthday present.”

A familiar chill of panic tickles at the base of Bucky’s spine.Another thing he should know but doesn’t—another part of himself that he questions but can’t disprove because he lacks the tools for his own verification. He’s gone quiet again, the kind of quiet that’s like being encased in cement for everyone involved.

Both of Sam’s arms fall and the package crinkles against the brush of his pants. “Hey, you okay Barnes?” He slides half a step closer but doesn’t reach out. “Bucky?”

Bucky’s neck snaps up, his shoulders straighten. He practices calling himself Bucky in his head; he makes it a habit and a mantra and an exercise in willing something to be. But it’s still like a hot slap across the face when another person says it—Steve included. It jars some of the frost loose.

“Is it my birthday?” Bucky looks at Sam hard. “I don’t think it’s my birthday.”

Sam smiles, no teeth but it splits his face open bright like the sun on fresh snow and Bucky feels like he might want to smile back. “It’s not your birthday—you got me. But I saw this online and March just felt like too long to wait…and hey, you’ve missed seven decades of birthdays so just think of this as either a really early present or a really, really late one.” He offers the package again, with both hands, and Bucky takes it by the edges. Feels like if he makes one wrong move it might actually explode—or worse, shatter and disappear through the rifts between his fingers.

Bucky examines it, turns it over and notes the clean cuts and folds, the way that no edge pokes out from the precise lines of tape. His face scrunches up at the pattern; it doesn’t seem very birthday-appropriate.

Sam must be able to read him better than he thinks because he jumps in, “That was one of literally three wrapping paper choices I had. It was either this or turkeys or a black background with “I’m Sorry” stamped all over it in white sparkles. I don’t know who buys Thanksgiving wrapping paper, but since it was Tony’s stash I guess the “Sorry” one makes sense…”

Bucky nods, although he thinks that he might have gotten a kick out of the turkeys.

Sam is fidgeting, drumming his hands on his thighs. “C’mon man, open it up. You’re making me nervous.”

Bucky has the sudden urge to stall, to critique the bow color and shake it up to his ear and say he’ll open it after he finishes his chicken. It strikes him as funny, more than funny—the annoyed crease on Sam’s forehead, the way he’d crossed his arms tight and jut his hip out to one side and put on an exaggerated pout. Bucky can see it in his mind and it makes him bite down hard on his tongue to keep from laughing rough right in Sam’s face.

There is a streak of 12 year-old boy in Bucky—a childish, trouble-making impulse that he’s only just started to mine into again. But there’s also a darker streak; a cruel, nasty part of him that the Soldier exploited but didn’t create. And there’s something else in there too, a swell in his chest that almost chokes him sometimes and he can feel it rising as he thinks about Sam buying a present for him for no reason other than that he thought Bucky might like it.

Bucky pulls at a taped corner and rips smooth and efficient down the seams. He’s caught off-guard when he hits another layer of gauzy yellow under the hearts; he tears through that a little less delicately. Slices fall onto the kitchen floor until Bucky’s holding nothing in his hands but a plastic-sheathed comic book.

The likeness is minimal and Bucky is actually a little offended by the size discrepancy but the take on the costume is intriguing. Steve looks likes how Bucky thinks he should remember him—smashing through a wall on his motorcycle with cowering Nazis in his wake—but somehow Bucky knows that the reality was a lot less technicolor and a lot more blood and filth and washing it all down with whiskey and bravado. And other things that Bucky doesn’t quite have a solid grip on yet.

But if he could remake it, could reinvent his memories, Bucky thinks he wouldn’t mind it being like this. **The Incredible Adventures of Captain America and Bucky Barnes** as the caption to his past.

He’s gone quiet again. Sam is leaning forward and swallowing audible and annoying and Bucky wonders what the caption to his present would be, if he had any say in it.

“Well, what do you think? Do you like it?” Sam’s voice is edged with a forced lightness but Bucky can see the uncertainty flutter in his gaze.“It’s vintage, you know; I had to watch that damn auction for like four hours and some fucker almost outbid me at the very end but people can’t underestimate the Falcon like—”

Bucky cuts him off with a metal hand to the neck, although it’s probably not the one that Sam expects. It’s more forceful than Bucky anticipates because he’s out of practice initiating, out of practice being impulsive in general. It’s not their first kiss—Sam saw a hell of a lot more of Bucky in their hotel room and on Sam’s cramped guest bed while Steve was off saving the world without them—but it is their first kiss since they came to the Tower. And it’s the first time Bucky’s kissed Sam. It’s the first time Bucky really wants to kiss _Sam_ —not just to feel warmth and tenderness from someone who doesn’t look at him and see the Soldier but because it’s _Sam_ and that means something more, something Bucky can understand even without remembering.

It starts off hard and unforgiving like being strapped to a steel chair but Sam eases him into it, doesn’t force him or corner him but persuades Bucky to pry himself open and let Sam in. Sam is firm hands pressing and hot mouth sliding and body crowding Bucky in a way he didn’t know he craved. Bucky’s fingers grind into the skin on Sam’s neck and it must hurt—it _has to_ hurt—but the noises that Sam makes and Bucky swallows down are low and guttural and maybe Sam’s got a little pain in his needs too. Bucky bites at his lip and hears a groan, only he’s not sure if it’s coming up from Sam’s throat or his.

When Sam starts to pull back Bucky doesn’t know if it’s been ten seconds or ten minutes but he drops it like he’s been scalded. He tries to move away—heart hammering, blood surging, nerves primed for shock and punishment—but Sam keeps him close with palms on his hips rubbing low, wide circles.

“Shit, Barnes.” Sam breathes out heavy and ragged.

Bucky pokes his jaw with a metal finger. “Watch your language, kid.”

Sam laughs at that, full and deep and it hits Bucky the same way their kisses do. “Guess I have to start buying you more gifts then.”

Bucky wants to say something to that, has something to say to that, but the words only half-form and all that comes out is, “Guess so.”

Sam smiles a little shy at him and Bucky smiles back—doesn’t think about it, just does it. And he doesn’t know a lot of things for certain but right now Bucky’s pretty sure that it wouldn’t kill him to show up to a few more morning team meetings.


End file.
